By Jonah Kessel

2012: The Year of the Dragon from Jonah Kessel on Vimeo.

The plan was simple: to one-up ourselves.

One year earlier friends and filmmakers Paul Morris, Kit Gillet and myself decided to make a short video documenting some of the fireworks in Beijing as China celebrated the Lunar New Year.

In fact, I even wrote about the experience on this blog here. Exactly one year later — we decided to do it again. However, this time — we wanted to go bigger. Much bigger.

This is a really interesting experiment: to come back to a video you made exactly one year later and reevaluate its strengths and weaknesses, and then try again. I believe this experience is a good check on your progress as a filmmaker and makes you step back and evaluate everything you do from shooting, to workflow to the art of story telling itself.

2011: The Year of the Rabbit from Jonah Kessel on Vimeo.

After we screened last year’s video we all agreed — it was kind of a stereotypical DSLR video with no real narrative. Pretty pictures, not enough of a story. There are a lot of these on the web.

This year, we wanted to tell the story of Chun Jie (Chinese New Year). However, we wanted to do it in such a way that would require very little dialogue. We wanted images to tell the story, but still have some voices in the piece — with the goal of keeping our own voices out of it. We wanted it to be cinematic but at the same time — real and unrehearsed. And while last year, we had no imposing deadlines, this year we would need to turn the video over in 36 hours to the New York Times. Now the experiment became — how to tell a story better than we had last year, shoot, process, translate and edit the footage — and transmit on China’s dodgy internet connections in less than 36 hours.

As we planned for the story and began to factor in the chaotic nature of China — we decided to bring in some more friends. Shooters Jim Fields and Keith Bedford would join our team, allowing us to be in multiple locations at once showing a wider variety of images from the celebration. We crafted a schedule, shot list and found an old man who via an interview we would setup as the story teller of Chun Jie, allowing us to dip out from narration.

To help to visually enforce the man as a story-teller and not just some old guy off the street, we put a pretty strong grade on his shots. We added about 15 points of sepia, added a vignette, desaturated, added contrast and sharpened a small bit. The hope was to visually represent the traditions that go along with this holiday for Chinese people by making him a bit more historic looking.

We encountered some of the same difficulties we did last year. The rolling shutter issue being a big and relatively unsolvable issue. While DSLRs are great for many things — for fireworks they are not. We did some tests and while we know we couldn’t stop it from happening, we did find ways to mitigate the effect. We found if fireworks were exploding at a fast enough pace to cause the rolling shutter, it would show up significantly less if the angle of the camera was in a relative perpendicular axes to the exploding object. Pulling further away from the object also helped a lot. However, in general, if you are using a DSLR and information is being recorded across the sensor in a horizontal motion as they do, and your subject happens to be exploding at an extremely high speed — you are simply using the wrong camera.

Nonetheless, we avoided it as much as possible and wrestled with the other innate problems of shooting fireworks such as exposing for something that (a) hasn’t happened yet and (b) you don’t know what will happen when it does explode. Dealing with quickly dying batteries in -15 C weather and trying to be setup in time to capture someone setting off a firework without telling them what to do is also an enormous challenge.

After 13 hours of shooting we all reported back to begin the editing process. We would have 23 hours left before deadline but there was much work ahead. Because of China’s slow web and long transmitting times for files the conversion files to Prores, translating, grading and creating the script would have be done with at least 2 hours to spare. This meant no sleeping, a lot of junk food, fast food and when things became painful, some beer. Days later, I made visual representation of this relatively comical 36 process to get this short film out.

ROLLING SHUTTER: 36 Hours in the Making of The Year of the Dragon from Jonah Kessel on Vimeo.

When we hit our deadline everyone was sleeping except me. Minutes before I was about to pass out, the video posted — and it posted front and center on the Times’ home page.

It was an amazing bit of timing and in one moment — the pain of the past day in half was gone and for just a brief moment, the world got a glimpse of an ancient Chinese tradition.

Happy New Year — 新年快乐

Jonah M. Kessel is a Beijing based freelance visual journalist working with the New York Times. Visit his web site here or follow him on Twitter here.

By Jonah Kessel

Wukan Video Journal from Jonah Kessel on Vimeo.

Using a fat Chinese man, a large backpack, a baseball cap and the hood from my sweatshirt, I attempted to hide myself.

I was sandwiched in between the beefy man and a f-stop Satori backpack jammed with gear on the rear of his motorcycle. He drove me down a dark dirt road in the middle of the night near the uniquely autonomous village of Wukan, Guangdong Province, China.

I was hiding from police and those who might not want attention drawn to the small village of about 13,000 people.

Earlier in the week, pissed off villagers had overthrown their leaders and in mass numbers chased the police out of town. When the police came back, they set up barriers and created a stronghold in their fishing community, only letting sympathizers and foreign journalists into the village. These outsiders started to grow in numbers and after a couple of days, a small media circus had developed.

The New York Times’ Edward Wong described the situation like this:

“The outsiders had come to see how furious residents had transformed their village on China’s southeast coast into a temporarily autonomous zone. Their anger focused on two issues: what they called illegal land sales by village officials, and the death on Dec. 11 of a village advocate while he was in police custody. The villagers chased out Communist Party officials, repelled an assault by police officers and barricaded all roads leading into Wukan with tree trunks. The two police stations in the village stood empty. So did the headquarters of the Communist Party committee.”

The villagers used this media circus and created a bit of a propaganda war. They shared their homes and food with us and drove us around on their motorcycles whenever we needed. This was a funny sight: I would be on the back of a motorcycle with a DSLR rig hung to the side, flying through small alleys and passing other motorcycles — all carrying journalists on the back as well.

With the global spotlight on this village, provincial officials were cornered and agreed to start negotiations with the angry mob.

Within 24 hours I filed one basic news video and one video journal (above) on my experience in Wukan. The video journal was paired with a text journal by Edward Wong. You can read his story “Canny Villagers Grasp Keys to Loosen China’s Muzzle” here. I shot mainly with one camera and a prime 24mm lens. While I love using jibs, sliders and mechanical movement, this video journal seemed most real shot hand-held.

While there was a lot of media there, I was the only DSLR video shooter (that I saw). All other newspapers, TV stations and wire service photographers were using standard video cameras — and with good reason. This was a tricky shoot and using a standard camera would certainly have been easier.

However, I knew it would be tricky and planned accordingly. Before I left I was told to pack light — bring no bells or whistles. Nothing extra. There would be limited car space, I would be riding by motorcycle and I would most likely have to run, so should bring only one bag.

Knowing this I created a really small franken-rig and minimized everywhere I could. Above, you can see what the franken-rig looked like disassembled and in use.

Above: f-stop Satori bag, Blackrapid RS-7 strap with Canon 60D with Canon 70-200 f/2.8 L USM, Canon 5DMII with Canon 24mm f/1.4 L USM, 2x Redrock Micro microHandGrip (Part # 2-19-0009), Redrock Micro Handlebar clamp (Part # 2-017-0002), 2x 18″ 15mm carbon fiber rods (Part # 8-011-0002), Porta Brace Universal Shoulder Pad, Jag35 Top Handle, Jag35 Tripod Plate Pro, Jag35 Quick Release Gorilla Stand with Zucoto Gorilla Plate, D | Focus Follow Focus, Jag35 90 Degree Clamp with ball head attached to a Ruige 5″ TL-S500 On-camera HD LCD monitor, Genus Counterweight for CSMK Shoulder Mount System (3.5 lb) and topped with a Rode VideoMic Pro Compact Shotgun Microphone.

I got all of this to fit into a single f-stop bag. The rig was small enough to fight for territory in press scrums and stable enough to run around in a less than stable environment.

This setup was also small enough to take onto a plane without checking anything. I kept one small tripod with me — although I barely used it.

The videos were largely edited during during the middle of the night or in the back of moving cars as I was fighting US East coast deadlines.

To see the strange conclusion to this story see my blog post “Wukan Journal Unfinished.” To see how this story unfolded check out these stories:

• Canny Villagers Grasp Keys to Loosen China’s Muzzle
• Demonstrators Who Took Over Chinese Village Halt Protest
• Officials Meet With Protesting Chinese Villagers
• Wukan Protesters Seek Return of Xue Jinbo’s Body
• Wukan Revolt Takes On a Life of Its Own

– Jonah M. Kessel is a Beijing based freelance visual journalist working with the New York Times. See his web site here and follow him on Twitter here.

By Jonah Kessel

Word Crimes from Jonah Kessel on Vimeo.

Murong Xuecun is one of the least boring people I have ever met.

He is energetic. He is dynamic. He is impressively clever. And in the last year, he has emerged as one of the most outspoken critics of censorship in China.

However, he is a writer.

And when New York Times’ correspondent Edward Wong first mentioned he was writing an in depth feature on Murong, I initially doubted an accompanying video component would help add much value to the package. I did some background research and found articles with still pictures of the young writer. Nearly every single one showed the author looking at a computer in some form or another, 3 out of 4 being a silhouetted picture of the back of his head with the computer out of focus or him at an internet café.

The images I saw were far from inspiring. I imagined a video full of talking heads, with sequences of static imagery that would inevitably go on for too long and insight viewers to click away.

But right before I decided it wasn’t worth making the video, I read this speech Murong had recently given which discussed censorship of written work in China. Words started jumping off the page:

This is castrated writing. I am a proactive eunuch, I castrate myself even before the surgeon raises his scalpel. Our language has been cut into two parts: one safe, and the other risky. Some words are revolutionary, and others are reactionary; some words we may use, and others belong to our enemies.

And just like that, I was hooked. This person was clearly an outspoken agent calling for change and reform in Chinese society. All of a sudden Murong turned from a writer into an incendiary subject on a hot topic. I jumped on board and got to thinking — how do I make a person who is visually boring interesting? And my first inspiration came directly from the same speech. Toward the top of his speech Murong discusses words likely to be censored should he use them in his books:

From my many years’ experience in writing and publishing, I could compile a Sensitive Words Glossary, in which you would certainly find the words “system,” “law,” “government,” as well as a large number of other nouns, several verbs, quite a few adjectives, and even a few special numbers. The glossary would also include all names of religions, all names of important people, all countries, including of course China, and also the phrase “Chinese people.”

On the backend of the speech, the author continued:

If there really were a Sensitive Words Glossary, I hope that it could be published; in this way at least we could all save a lot of time, and reduce the possibility of unwittingly committing “word crimes.”

My idea for the video came to me while sitting in a small airport in Burlington, Vermont on my way back to China I thought — maybe I can help him publish this list of sensitive words. I dreamed up a bunch of scenarios of how I could visualize a list of words and eventually came to the conclusion that I should let this man say the words that ordinarily he can’t say.

This train of thought continued onto the topic of voiceovers vs subtitles. Most international broadcast news videos gets a voiceover treatment – I started thinking it would be completely ironic to mute the man, when he is in fact, talking about words which he cannot use. I decided subtitles were more appropriate – which then opened up more doors for cinematic storytelling and made it a little easier to justify adding music to a news piece. Although I was excited to make the piece I was still a bit worried about keeping it moving and wanted the music to help keep the piece from drying up.

Now, regardless of the man’s profession, I had a hot subject and an idea for a snappy intro. I had music to help move the piece in a rhythmic narrative and a logic behind how I would represent his opinions visually.

And while I knew I had to film him writing or at the computer, I also knew I wanted to get him out of the context where we are used to seeing writers. When you get stuck shooting a “boring” person (or one who doesn’t do anything visually exciting) I think its a great exercise to find a new physical environment. Simply get them out of the physical environment where we expect to see them. It doesn’t matter where — just someplace else. I wanted to see him interacting with people and when I found out he was going out to dinner with some journalists and human rights lawyers, I was ecstatic when I got the invite to tag along.

This was the trickiest part of the video — both visually and narratively. How to link the home interviews, the writing visuals and a bunch of guys at dinner. With some thinking, it was easy enough to have narration lead the story into the restaurant, but shooting this was much more tricky.

There’s a Zoom H1 hidden on the table near the bear drinking, cigarette smoking intellectuals. I have a Canon 60D switching between a Gorilla Pod, a tripod and the in-table lazy susan. In addition, I had a 5D mkII on a shoulder rig. And while I didn’t leave a camera rolling the entire time, I did leave the audio rolling. When I got back, I synched all of the audio with the video clips I had. Although I had tons of great dialogue in the end I just grabbed one meaty quote that allowed me to jump from frame to frame anachronistically. Had I used multiple quotes or too much back and forth dialogue, I would have been forced into using more real time footage. Using just one quote allowed me to use some of my favorite visuals from the entire night.

With the intro set and multiple environments in the bank, I just needed to shoot the interviews. Knowing that I was at risk of having a boring video, I kept two cameras rolling continually during the interviews so when it came time to cut, I could keep all my frames short and bounce between a Canon 50mm f1.2 and a Canon 24mm f1.4.

With the credit roll, intro and title sequence, the video came out at 4 minutes and 20 seconds. Keeping voiceover out, adding music, using multiple environments and multiple cameras rolling during interviews, I hope I succeeded in making a visually “boring person” interesting.

And while I can’t answer that question for you, I can say the greater lesson I took away from this project are the potential assets we gain from simply researching what our subjects. What they have to say, have said and what they might want to say.

MORE ON MURONG XUECUN:
• Read Edward Wong’s story “Pushing China’s Limits on Web, if Not on Paper”
• An Excerpt from ‘Leave Me Alone: A Novel of Chengdu’
• More on Murong: Words We Can Use, and Those We Can Not

– Jonah M. Kessel is a Beijing based freelance visual journalist working with the New York Times. See his web site here and follow him on Twitter here.

By Dan Chung

CNN have been in touch to say that their latest show ‘The Next List’ with Dr. Sanjay Gupta launches today. It’s all about innovation and fittingly it’s all been shot on Canon DSLRs. Running at 2:00-2:30pm ET each Sunday, the programme will profile exceptional individuals. The first is cyber-illusionist Marco Tempest. Check out the trailer by clicking on the image below.

By Tom Pietrasik

SALOON from Tom Pietrasik on Vimeo.

Before making Saloon – my first film – I had been aware of the potential of DSLRs to capture beautiful video, but uncertain of how exactly to approach this new medium.  I’d been inspired to take things further by the work of Dan Chung, Philip Bloom and others I’d heard speak at the Canon Pro Solutions event last year in London.   I took a video course organised by the National Union of Journalists and bought myself the basic kit required for film-making and began planning the production of a short film.  I’ve learn t much from the process, not least of which is the basic – and often inconvenient – question of obtaining proper legal authorization for the use of music.

I chose my subject carefully. Having lived in Delhi for ten years, I was familiar with the relaxed and often jovial atmosphere of barber shops and knew that they were very colourful institutions that are great to photograph. The work of a barber also involves plenty of repetition, which is ideal for filming activity that can later be edited together to produce the sequences for a film.

I don’t like to interfere with subjects when I’m taking stills and I wanted to adhere to the same rule when making my film, to produce an authentic account of life in a barber shop. So I allowed events to unfold naturally and, apart from the early shots of the hairdressers looking to camera, the only scenes I “directed” were of a barber loading a blade into the razor and a hand collecting the comb (which I knew could be edited to one of the many shots I had of men grooming their newly coiffured locks).

‘Saloon’ was made over the course of a weekend in a lower-middle class suburb of New Delhi using my Canon 5DmkII and a Chrosziel focus-finder mounted on a Manfrotto 679B monopod with the optional retractable legs that provide for greater stability. I’ve always used prime lenses for my stills work but was aware that a zoom would allow me to work faster, mixing wider establishing shots and close-ups without the need to change lenses. So, I opted for a Canon 24-70mm f2.8L as my principal lens.

At work with the 5DmkII in Ganiyari, Chhattisgarh, India. (Photo by Dilip D'Souza)

This set-up is not perfect. I found that the cramped confines of a barber shop are not particularly suited to working with a monopod and, for a few of the shots in Saloon, I worked hand-held, dispensing with the focus-finder and resorting to my lighter Canon 50mm f1.4 lens instead of the zoom lens. In addition to providing a few extra stops, this smaller kit allowed me to get close-in to my subjects without the awkwardness of wielding a large lens.

The music for Saloon was an important decision. I’ve never particularly enjoyed Indian commercial cinema but, ever since I saw the movie Dil Se, almost 15 years ago, I’ve been aware that the Tamil composer A.R. Rahman has written some wonderful musical scores. Not only is “Satrangi Re” an infectious song, it comprises a couple of distinct themes and breaks between these themes which is great for editing. As the song ebbs and flows, so too do the sequences of my film and, though it’s less than three minutes long, I like to think that the shifting pace – accentuated by Rahman’s score – somehow makes Saloon feel more substantial.

I made Saloon mainly practice my skills and it was only later, buoyed by the praise I’d received from the small number of friends to whom I’d subsequently shown the film, that I considered entering Saloon into competitions and festivals. The prospect that my film might be widely screened by established institutions meant I had no alternative but to obtain a music license for Satrangi Re. I began negotiation from an awkward position. Satrangi Re had become such an integral part of Saloon that I couldn’t envisage an alternative. I just didn’t want to contemplate the idea of my film running to a different soundtrack. Not only would this involve a lot of time and effort re-editing, but the result was likely to be less effective without the oscillating rhythm that seemed so well suited to Saloon. 

I also had the niggling anxiety that I might actually be refused a licence or that the rights holder would quote me a fee beyond my means. I had no idea what I was getting into. Rahman had relinquished ownership of Satrangi Re many years ago and I would have to deal with a Mumbai-based production company with vastly more experience in the negotiation of music rights than me. Ultimately, the process proved quite difficult. There was lots of back and forth on the phone and I found the experience not unlike attempting to agree a taxi fare with the many drivers I’d employed during my ten years work as a photographer in India.

To my relief a licence was eventually granted which means my film can now be shown – along with other shortlisted Virgin Media Shorts – as a preview to features screened at Picturehouse cinemas across the UK over the next twelve months. It’s a real privilege to have AR Rahman’s music feature in my short film but the process of establishing the right to use his work is not one I’d like to repeat. It really is worthwhile anticipating the question of legal permission for the use of music well before the editing process begins. 

Saloon has now been entered into several festivals and it has been shortlisted for this year’s Virgin Media Shorts competition (a winner will be announced on November 10th). 

Tom Pietrasik is a British photographer & filmaker dividing his time between London and New Delhi. His photography has appeared in a variety of publications including National Geographic Adventure magazine, The Financial Times magazine and Marie Claire. He also shoots for development agencies including UNICEF and the World Health Organization together with NGOs like ActionAid, Oxfam and Save the Children. You can read more about Tom on his blog.

By Dan Chung

(Photo courtesy of Matt Jeppsen/FreshDV)

The past weekend Hollywood DP Shane Hurlbut ASC unveiled the new Master Cinema series of rigs which bear his name and are made by Letus. Shane has long been a proponent of using the smaller form factor of cameras like the 5D mkII to create cinema. His work features a lot of handheld motion and often relies on putting the camera into hitherto impossible places. The new line of rigs is designed to allow a DSLR to move easily and quickly between different handheld and studio situations. Some of the larger designs mimic the handling of more traditional movie camera setups. It might be interesting to see how some of these rigs perform in a documentary rather than Hollywood environment.



Matt Jeppsen of FreshDV has some behind the scenes video from the launch. You can find more details of the new rigs over here and here.

You can also read about the rigs and the concepts behind them on Shane’s blog.

By Ben Emery

I guess when we all started out in this industry as news cameramen or photographers we dreamed of the type of jobs we would be shooting; whether its covering the human tragedy in some war torn country or amazing stories in far away exotic lands. The unfortunate reality of the news industry in the 21st century is we work to feed the demands of a 24/7 machine who’s hunger for news content never tires, we work under continually shrinking budgets and increasing pressures. Even for those of us fortunate enough to get to travel the world covering these stories we rarely have the time or budget to cover the stories we want the way we want to. But every so often – for a lucky few – we get to shoot our dream job. This is a brief account of shooting my dream job.

The dream job

Late in 2010 Aljazeera English called for pitches for a new program of hour long documentaries called ‘Correspondent’. This was to be a flagship program which would explore a story through the eyes of Al Jazeera’s correspondents. A few years back I’d heard of the Kingdom of Mustang, an ancient Tibetan land hidden high in the Himalayan mountains. Up until fairly recently Mustang had been cut of from the rest of the world, protected by the foreboding fortress which is the Himalayas, foreigners forbidden entry. Life there had remained almost untouched for hundreds of years. But this rich and ancient culture is facing destruction, the threat coming from across its northern borders, where a road is being built to pass through Mustang and eventually connect Chinese controlled Tibet and India, thus ending Mustang’s isolation. The road is due to be completed soon and with it will come the full force of the 21st century. I knew it was one of the last opportunities to witness and document one of the few remaining places on earth where true Tibetan Buddhism is still being practiced. I approached correspondent Steve Chao, who has a deep interest in Tibet having been based in China for many years. Together we pitched it to ‘Correspondent’.

The shoot would be a logistical nightmare. It would take us five days by horseback to get to the capital Lo Manthang, all our equipment would need to travel in with us. Power was very limited as was fuel for generators so these too would have to be brought with us. The return journey to Kathmandu would be by helicopter and because of the high altitude we would be facing severe weight restrictions limiting the equipment we could take with us. Our team consisted of correspondent Steve Chao, Producer Mat Skene and myself. We also had our Nepalese fixer Subel Bhandari, our local guides Tashi Bista and Wangdue Tsering, two government minders (a necessity in the restricted zone of Mustang) and a trekking support team of seven – including porters, cooks and horsemen. In total that’s a team of fifteen and lets not forget our seven horses.

Producer Mat Skene was keen from the outset to shoot the documentary on a Canon 5DmkII. During his ‘day job’ he is the program editor for Al Jazeera’s US based current affairs program ‘Faultlines’. The half hour show is exclusively shot on DSLR, probably one of the only television programmes of its style to do so. Mat wanted Mustang to have a cinematic feel that he knew the 5DmkII could deliver although initially I had my concerns. I’d shot with DSLRs before but only for short 2-3 minute news packages. A 60 minute documentary was going to be a very different beast.

My primary concern was going to be media management; we predicted having between 1TB and 1.5 TB of data for the whole project and it would need to be backed up in triplicate. Also we would need to record audio separately for the many planned interviews – each an hour in duration. Syncing this would be a big job. Fortunately Mat was going to do the post production in DC with Faultlines editor Warwick Meade, a veteran of the DSLR work flow. That was the reassurance I needed and I put aside ideas of shooting it on a traditional broadcast camera such as the Sony PDW-700.

My Kit consisted of the following –

2x Canon 5DmkII
1x Canon 7D
7x batteries
5x 32gb Memory cards
16-35mm f2.8L
24-70mm f2.8L
70-200mm f2.8L IS
24-105mm f4L IS
24mm f1.4L II
50mm f1.2L
85mm 1.2L II
400mm f4 DO IS
Extender 2x III
2x Rode video mic
2x Zoom H4n
2x Sennheiser EK2000 radio mic set (RX/TX)
1x Sennheiser shot gun mic
2x Headphones
Marshall VLCD70XP 7” HDMI monitor
2x Zacuto Z-Finder
2x Singh-Ray Vari ND 77mm
1x Genus Vari ND 77mm
1x Nature Vari ND 82mm
Genus wide angle matte box
Assortment of Tiffen 4×4 filters (polo, Grad ND etc)
Sachtler CF tripod with 18p head
Kessler Pocketdolly slider
Matthews suction cup camera mount
Cavision shoulder mount.

1x 17” Macbook Pro
1x 15” Macbook Pro
5x Lacie rugged 1TB
2x Lacie rugged 500gb
1x Nexto 750gb
1x Express slot CF card reader
2x Sandisk firewire Express card readers

I would need to light a lot of the interviews but decided to take only a basic kit. Where possible I used available, only using my lights to compliment it, giving the interviews a more natural look. Obviously all the lights would need to be DC powered so I took a kit made up of exclusively LED lights:

1x 1×1 Litepanels 5600k Flood
1x 1×1 Litepanels 5600k Superspot
1x Litepanels mini plus with battery
2x small cheap AA batt powered camera LEDs (to be used as background lights)
Assorted colour correction gells and diffusion
3 light stands, 2x reflectors, black wrap, black cloth and some basic grip kit
2x IDX Endura 10 batteries and charger for the 1×1’s

I’ve probably forgotten some stuff…. but yes that’s right, this is me traveling light! I took duplicates of a lot of equipment as redundancy was key – If equipment failed I wouldn’t be able to find a replacement on location. I shot most of the interviews using the prime lenses and used the zooms for overlay and sequences. I know that Canon make some of the sharpest zoom lenses available but they really can’t be compared to the fast primes for quality. The fast primes are astounding – letting me shoot using only available light in some very dimly lit locations.

For the most part the Canon cameras and lenses performed flawlessly in the harsh conditions as would be expected of their pro series equipment. I did encounter a few technical issues mostly to do with dust on the 5DmkII sensor. Mustang lies in the Himalayan rain shadow so is essentially a high altitude desert. This coupled with the fact that we were living and working in tents made keeping dust out of the equipment a full time job. Despite the 5DmkII sensor cleaning function I still ended up with dust spots ruining some material I’d shot. I’m not sure how I could have avoided this – changing lenses constantly is a necessary evil with the DSLR. I also encountered issues with the 7D overheating and causing the camera to crash. An image would freeze on the rear LCD and the battery would need to be removed to reset it. I found this strange as day time temps only reached a max of 24-25 degrees C.

The other technical issues I encountered were mostly with the accessories we strapped to the DSLRs to transform them from stills cameras to video cameras. As I feared before leaving a lot of these accessories are not built to the rugged standard that we expect of professional broadcast equipment. For example the rubber bands on the Rode microphone mount broke constantly. I had a Juicedlink mixer which lasted about a day before failing. The Singh-Ray vari ND’s vignetted on the 24-70 and 24-105, the Genus 77mm Vari ND jiggled apart on horse back one day causing the front piece of glass to fall into a rocky river bed. The Nature 82mm vari ND had a strange patchy effect when it was set to max. The Z-finders constantly fell off the cameras (though to their testament never broke).

As I suspected the media management was a real challenge, ultimately it added one and a half hours extra work to my day on top of the twelve hours shooting and traveling. After we’d settled in a camp I’d set up my Mac with the 3 1TB hard drives daisy chained together and the CF card reader in the express slot. I’d then create a folder for the date, then camera A and camera B, then cards 1 to 5 plus a file for the Zoom recorder audio. This would be duplicated on all three drives and I’d start copying the files off. Most days I’d shoot one to two cards. Once they had finished copying we would review the rushes and verify the copies. Dust, or the constant jiggling of horse back travel, eventually killed 3 of my 5 Lacie ‘rugged’ hard drives causing a few stressful and sleepless nights! I never carried the 3 drives in the same place for safety and fortunately the decision to have copies in triplicate paid dividends – we didn’t lose any of the material.

I don’t mean to sound down on DSLRs but I do want people to be aware of the limitations of some of this equipment. The fantastic image quality that can be achieved with DSLRs has been well documented on the internet and nobody needs to hear its praise sung again. But the reality of shooting for broadcast on this equipment does mean a compromise – especially for those of us more familiar with professional broadcast equipment.

Shooting ‘Mustang: Kingdom on the Edge’ was an extraordinary adventure and I learned a lot along the way, both about shooting on DSLR and about an incredible culture that the world stands to lose. I was very privileged to get the opportunity to work with a fantastic team and my heartfelt thanks goes out to them all.

Hopefully the results speak for themselves, ‘Mustang: Kingdom on the Edge’ is airing now on Aljazeera English from the 13th of October. You can watch it here.

You can follow me on Twitter @benjamin_emery

Ben Emery is an award winning cameraman based out of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia for Aljazeera. He is a multiple ACS (Australian Cinematography Society) award winner having won the prestigious Neil Davis Golden Tripod for International News Coverage in 2010 for his work on the Bangkok riots. Ben has covered major stories around the world and is an avid user of DSLR technology.

By Alexis Wanneroy

In my day job as an animator working at Dreamworks animation studios I find myself in the company of great artists every day. In the hallways I see amazing character designs, backgrounds and development art from our films.  There are a gallery of artists working toward a common goal – the movies we do. Having a concentration of so many talented artists in one place is rare.

The Moonshine book project was conceived as an opportunity to showcase the personal work of those artists and the breath of artistic development talent at Dreamworks. It was instigated and edited by Christophe Lautrette, who also co-directed this short documentary with me. We decided that it would be amazing to showcase the work the Artists did for the book in video, giving people a sneak peek into their private lives.

I shot and Christophe asked questions to the artists. I was blown away by the diversity of the artists and their work. Our task in this video was to show as much as possible in a very limited time.

I’ve owned a Canon 5DmkII for two years now and fell in love with the fact that you could do videos with a DSLR – OMG did it look good! I started to buy gear but on a limited budget because although video is my passion it is at this point just a hobby. I bought a camera rig from Indi systems ( I don’t like because it is sooooo heavy, but it was cheap), a LCDVF loupe, a Weifeng 717A video tripod, a Rode VideoMic Pro, a monitor ( I don’t want to mention the brand but it helps me focus ) and a D-focus follow focus that I really like.

For lenses I used a 60mm Micro Nikkor and the Nikkor 28mm f2.0 that I love. I use them on my 5DmkII with a Fotodiox Nikon to EOS adapter. I also have the Canon 50mm f1.4 that I use in low light conditions. It’s a very basic setup but it gets the job done.

When editing the footage I wanted to have a special flow to it so that the audience would feel peace and calm – I did this by not rushing the shots and adding a very simple musical score. To make it more interesting I made very short video portraits of the artists which I cut into the interviews. For the color correction I aimed for a yellowish wash look to keep the moon theme. I used the Technicolor Cinestyle picture profile on my 5DmkII which I found fairly easy to color correct and gave us a great latitude in post.

This was my first documentary work so it was very challenging and learned a lot on the go. I have just started to shoot videos for commercial purposes but this documentary had a totally different feeling to them. It also had a very different approach than all my other videos but for me it was a great experience – being able to film people sharing their passion was just so interesting and fulfilling. I would love to do more work like this as I move forward.

For more details on the Moonshine book : http://moonshineartproject.wordpress.com
and to see some of my work: http://vimeo.com/channels/alexiswanneroy
And Christophe’s work: http://lautrette.blogspot.com/

By Jonah Kessel

As a video journalist I’m frequently approached by people asking me to come film — whatever it is they have that’s going on. A Chinese rock band, a new brand or some really exciting business conference are the usual suspects. These people often think their event would be so fun to film, that I would love to do it — for free.

Sadly these people are mistaken and generally speaking whatever guest speaker is at the “Annual Chinese Conference of Bilateral Business” is not actually that interesting.

However, last week while at a small bar in Beijing, a Québécoise approached me and told me he had built a device out of a tricycle that could paint Chinese characters on the ground with water droplets as it was peddled. I stopped for a second and thought about it and my first question was — why?

And his answer was … “because!”

Meet French Canadian Media Artist Nicholas Hanna. This guy decided to build a device for no reason, that doesn’t really serve a clear purpose. So, I decided, this would also be a good time to create a video just “because.”

I wanted to keep it short, sweet and corky. An afternoon filming, a weird soundtrack with an upright bass and a didgeridoo and some editing and we had this fun device on film.

Just Because: Tricycle Calligraphy 水书法器 from Jonah Kessel on Vimeo.

Ironically, I found the best way to film this strange contraption — was on another tricycle, peddled by the days assistant Annie Sallaberry. Now picture both of these tricycles peddling through the old streets of Beijing and you can imagine we were quite the spectacle. As we filmed, people would actually just start following us down the street as if we were the Pied Piper of Chinese people.

As working visual journalists I think its a really great exercise do go out and shoot stuff for fun. Its really easy to get in the habit of only shooting when working. But this two day project was a lot of fun and helped me get back to my roots a bit. It reminded me why we do this in the first place — because its fun.

So — for no reason at all, enjoy.

Kit List for this Project:

• Canon EOS 5D Mark II
• Canon EOS 60D
• Canon EF 14mm f/2.8L II USM
• Canon EF 24mm f/1.4L II USM
• Canon EF 50mm f/1.2L USM
• Canon MP-E 65mm f/2.8 1-5x Macro
• Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM
• Franken-Rig made from Ikan, Genus, Jag35 and Zacuto parts.
• Kessler Krane Pocket Dolly v2.0, Traveler Size
• Kessler Crane All Terrain Outrigger Feat
• Rhode NTG Shotgun Condenser Microphone
• Pearlstone Universal Shock Mount
• Sony UHF Wireless Lavalier System
• Zoom H4n Mobile Handycam Audio Recorder
• (2x) Manfrotto 190Cx Carbon Fibre Q90 4-section Tripod
• F-Stop Satori Expedition Pack
• F-Stop Tilopa Expedition Pack
• (3x) F-Stop ICU (small, medium, large)
• Blackrapids RS-7 R-Strap

– Jonah M. Kessel is a Beijing-based freelance visual journalist working with photography, video, print and web design. Follow Jonah on Twitter here and see his web site here.

By Dan Chung

DSLR video guru Phil Bloom has been lucky enough to get his hands on the new VAF-5D2 anti-aliasing filter which potentially solves one of the biggest image quality issues with the Canon 5DmkII.

Aliasing creates the infamous moire pattern where false colour information is seen in an image and is caused by the way the camera downsizes the video image from it’s 25MP stills sensor to the much smaller 1080P image. It is often seen on brick walls or textured fine fabrics. Up until now the only way to avoid this has been to carefully shoot shots so the effect doesn’t seem obvious (ie no brick walls or women wearing silk scarves) or try to fix the problem using software in post production – neither technique is really suited to news and documentary production.

The Mosaic Engineering filter is a physical filter solution that effectively removes the excess bits of the signal that causes the aliasing in the 1080P image. In essence it slightly blurs the image just enough that the camera can still get a clear 1080P image. It appears to help with moire and also ‘stair stepping’ where straight lines like telegraph wires appear jagged in video. Most digital stills cameras (including the 5DmkII) already have one anti-aliasing filter fitted on the front of the image sensor but it is optimized for stills shooting and does nothing to help with video shooting – the Mosaic Engineering one is optimized for video. Have a look at Phil’s video test below.



This really does look like a great solution for DSLR news shooters and I hope to test one for myself soon. The way the filter is easily installed and removed looks to be a great solution for photographers who also need to shoot stills with the same camera.

Phil does note that the filter doesn’t work well on very wide angle images where there is corner blurring. He also notes that the image is slightly softened and that the lens does not remain parfocal (ie focus shifts as you move through the zoom range). There may also be issues with older lenses like Nikon manual focus ones where there are metal parts and levers that protrude from the rear of the lens – these may hit the anti-aliasing filter or get stuck.

At the moment this filter only works with the 5DmkII and there is no confirmation of versions for other Canon cameras like the 7D or 60D. Price is set at US $385.

Cinematographer Glenn Przyborski has been working with Mosaic engineering to create and test the filter. You can see some of his sample videos here:

You can order the filter and find out more on the Mosaic Engineering website.
You can see Phil’s full report here.